Great article. Launching fast is always a good thing for any startup. The challenge with our startup, PayGuard, is that we are a payments processing service. Building the site is not the issue, the integration with financial institutions are. We were able to build the Alpha version of the product with all the key basic functionalities in 6 weeks but we could not test it yet to actually transfer money. We began testing the key features using dummy data.
It's good to see somebody else building a complex product. People seem to forget that not all projects can be launched overnight - if you're building a WordPress plugin then, sure, you can launch and start selling it immediately, and iterate new features thereafter. If you're building something that effectively provides access to a complex technology (algorithm, integration point, workflow, etc.) then the time-to-usefulness can be much longer.
That is why we're trying to figure out ways to test key functions that does not require integration. We are currently focusing on user experience and logic workflow.
